YMMV / My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic S3 E13 "Magical Mystery Cure"

• Accidental Innuendo: Spike's "Gangnam Style" hopping, which Psy explained as a "horse-riding dance", seems to suggest that Spike likes "riding" ponies...and the mares in Sugar Cube Corner thought it was cute.
• Adorkable:
  • The little "Oooooooooh!" Twilight makes when she fangirls over Star Swirl the Bearded.
  • Fluttershy twiddling her hooves when she says "But I don't really know anything about animals..."
  • "Is there a book on being a princess I should read!?" Oh Twilight, never change.
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: "A True, True Friend" delivers the intended Aesop about helping friends find their true selves in musical. But the prominence and fantasticness of the cutie marks/destinies swap caused many to see it as "don't blindly follow perceived destiny, especially if you're bad at it/it makes you and others miserable" and/or "you can Screw Destiny and be who you choose/want to be" despite more-or-less contradicting the happenings of the episode.^explanation They were incapable of doing their "incorrect" destinies/cutie marks which wouldn't be the case if it truly was up to choice. And Twilight's destiny to become an alicorn princess is accepted despite her having no choice in nor personal want for it.
• Broken Base
  • Did this episode do a good job condensing a dense plot into a twenty minute episode or is it a rush job bloated out with too many unnecessary songs?
  • Similarly, was this the beginning of a bold new phase of the Friendship is Magic storyline or is it nothing but gimmicks and cliches that signaled Seasonal Rot?
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Becoming an Alicorn Princess is now something that can be earned?!
  • How exactly did the spell change the Mane Six minus Twilight's backstories to result in them having each other's cutie marks? One particularly popular theory is that Pinkie Pie married Big Macintosh.
• Fan Nickname: Because this episode has so many songs, some fans call it "Musical Mystery Cure".
• Harsher in Hindsight: Celestia's statement that Star Swirl the Bearded "did not understand friendship like [Twilight] does". The comic series reveals that Celestia and Star Swirl were friends and their friendship fell apart when he caught her traveling through a magical mirror without his permission. The Season 7 finale backed her statement up.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Holly Giesbrecht, an animator on the show and the creator of background (and later toyline) pony Holly Dash, drew this bit of Side-Story Bonus Art early on in the show's life, the sketch was posted about a month after the first episode aired. What was originally some cute fanart from one of the animators (with the colored version mysteriously taken off of her DeviantArt page) ended up being some epic Foreshadowing.
  • The same applies to the countless number of Alicorn Twilight fan fics and pictures that existed before this episode was announced.
  • Getting back to the original conflict, you would not believe the number of "Twilight-screws-up-a-spell" fanfictions that were made in the past two years. It was considered cliche before the actual show got a chance to use it.
  • Pinkie Pie receiving Applejack's cutie mark takes on a slightly new light after "Pinkie Apple Pie" toyed with the idea that they could be distantly related and even though nothing was confirmed by the end of that episode, it didn't deny it either.
  • When news of the Brony phenomenon began to reach the major news networks during the series' first season, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me brought on former US President Bill Clinton to play "Not My Job" and answer questions about the show. ^note As a former POTUS, Clinton is arguably one of the most influential and relevant people in the world, while a show for little girls like MLP must be, they reasoned, one of the least relevant topics. (He got every question right.) This episode literally has five of the Mane Six playing "Not My Job".
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The main complaint on the episode (after the initial kerfuffle about Alicorn Twilight) seems to be that it felt a little rushed and should have been a two-parter. Most importantly, it was never explained what Twilight's change would mean. A tweet from Meghan McCarthy states that there will be two more episodes which will turn this episode into a three-parter. Those two episodes did address this by setting up a Half-Arc Season which ultimately answered those critiques. M.A. Larson also said he wanted it to be a two-parter, but Executive Meddling told him no.
• It Was His Sled: Months after the episode aired, the severe fandom reaction to Twilight becoming a princess (with individual reactions ranging from excitement to outrage to mere shock) had become so widespread and memetic that any newcomer to the fandom could immediately know about Twilight's ascension without even watching the episode.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Liquid Pride; totally different from crying.
  • A character is going to become an alicorn? Major change in the status quo? Blame it all on LARSON!
  • The split-screen from "What My Cutie Mark Is Telling Me" with the Mane Six looking sad became a popular subject for re-draws.
• Mis-blamed: Some fans blame M. A. Larson and him alone for all this episode did. He spoke out about the episode, and emphasized his original script for it was significantly different, most importantly he wanted it to be a two-part episode, and he wrote it with the understanding this was the series finale. Then the script was taken out of his hands, shrunken down into one episode, and some of the removed plot elements were moved into Season 4's premiere.
• Spoiled by the Format: You know there's going to be more coming when it looks like the problem's solved and everything's going to be all fine and dandy with a third of the episode left.
• Squick: The way Pinkie's legs bend when she tries to applebuck a tree during the Cutie Mark song... ow.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Find a Way" sounds like a slowed-down rendition of "Major Tom (I'm Coming Home)," particularly the delivery of the lines "Losing promise, I don't know what do/Seeking answers, I feel I won't get through."
• Tainted by the Preview: An "audio only" version of one of the songs in the episode, A True True Friend, was leaked on Internet five days before the episode aired, with it not having mixed reactions from people at Equestria Daily, but also hinted that the "swapped Cutie Marks" plot would be rushed for the sake of having Twilight become an alicorn in the final minutes.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Most of the criticism to Twilight becoming an Alicorn Princess boils down to this since it was a major (and permanent) physical change to the main character as well as one of the first (of many) major changes to the show's status quo.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Mane Character's roles get swapped? Wait, what do you mean that it doesn't happen to the main Mane Character? We barely get to see results before Twilight figures out how to solve the problem, since the third act is needed for Alicorn Twilight. As noted above, some fans think this should have been a two-parter or at least a standalone episode.
  • Some fans were a bit dismayed that Twilight flew into the camera at the very end because an episode about her learning how to use to her new wings would have been nice. While her future appearances show her struggling to fly well, it's only as a minor at most plot point.
  • The show has thus far only given hints as to how exactly Cutie Marks work and how much they signify. This would have been the perfect opportunity to go into this subject but once again they don't, except by implication. Plus, there's also the fact that the dilemma was solved with the most obvious and direct solution possible instead of having to make them work for the solution.
• Vindicated by History: At the time the episode was released, it split the fanbase in half over Twilight becoming an alicorn and being the show's first true Musical Episode. Which lead to criticisms of the episode feeling rushed. The latter leading to (the first of many) complaints of the rushed nature of these kind of episodes. With Twilicorn having been a staple of the show for next six seasons of the show's run, the grievances fan had regarding this creative decision have largely subsided, and more recent viewers tend to view the episode in a much more favorable light. With the only real points of contentions today being how well it did its job as a Musical Episode and the aforementioned pacing issues.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Special attention has been paid to the lighting of this episode: there are several beautiful instances of shading, and some lens flares have been added. Add to this some dynamic camera movements (particularly the first shot, imitating the opening theme song), the epic shot of Rarity struggling to control a storm during The Cutie Mark Song, some particularly smooth animation, especially on Alicorn Twilight, and the gorgeous Celestial Plane (called "Caelum" early in production), and "Magical Mystery Cure" is the best-looking episode up to this point of the series by a long shot.
• Wangst: One sticking point for critics of the episode is that Twilight's immediate reaction to causing the episode's conflict is to hole herself up in her house feeling sorry for herself. Many felt it was a sign that the show was slipping into one of the trappings of children's shows that it had, up to that point, been avoiding (in this case, the conflict stemming from someone just being sad).
• The Woobie: The whole mane six for the first half, especially Twilight, who is feeling guilt-ridden for causing the whole mess to begin with.
  • Rarity gets this more than the others, because it's pretty clear that between Pinkie not being around to cheer people up, Fluttershy's pitiful attempts that seem to bore and annoy the Ponyville citizens, and Rarity's own poor weather handling skills, Rarity's pretty clearly the most hated pony in Ponyville. She's also the only one who actually starts to cry and flinches like she's expecting to be hit when Dash takes out the cloud that's above her. She also just looks the most pitiful during Twilight's song due to her wet mane.

---